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Stitching Together a Quilt of Student Voices

On the last day of our Minds Made for Stories summer camp for middle school students — a partnership between Western Massachusetts Writing Project, the Springfield Armory, Duggan Middle Academy, Veterans Education Project and Mass Humanities — students worked to finish up historical research projects, including the Home Poem project that was worked on each day of the week.

I set up a podcasting station and each student (and a few of us teachers) read stanzas or lines from the Home Poem, which sought to connect students to their heritage and culture and family through sensory imagery and memory. Each day, we guided students into stanzas. None had ever done podcasting or recording of their voices before, so it was a new experience.

We used the “quilt metaphor” quite a bit during the week — it was part of the information about the kind of work women might have been doing at home before they went into the workforce during WW2. We’ve created pieces for an actual quilt that will hang in the Duggan School in the fall, as a visual connection between the social justice school and the Springfield Armory. We created daily video quilts, of work and play being done all week.

The Home Poem Quilt Video Project is stitched together by layering student voice underneath images and videos of the quilt project, and the two themes — the visual connection to culture and memory and the poetic writing about home — came together quite nicely.